lester: his legend will remain foremost.

​More than any other human in the history of horse racing, Lester Piggott stamped his name and will on the sport and the legend of Lester will survive for as long as the sport of horse racing survives. Perhaps for much longer. Very few top sportsman become known by their first name, especially outside of the sport that was their career. Yet even outside of sport, the public today will almost certainly recognise the name, with the majority knowing his profession. He was a jockey; he won all those Derbies at Epsom. He was the housewives darling, wasn’t he?
I have to admit he was never my favourite jockey. I admired his achievements, the sacrifices he made to keep his weight under control. But his style of riding, relying too much, too often, on the rat-a-tap-tap of his whip, did not sit well with me. His riding of The Minstrel in the Epsom Derby, although it drew amazement and admiration from his peers and journalists, was as ugly a picture of race-riding as imaginable. Looking back, Lester commented that in today’s era he would have received a week of suspension. He knew himself he was excessively hard on his mount, not that it would have bothered him. He won and made the horse the stallion his owners required. In today’s era, he would have received twenty-eight days, not seven.
I didn’t care also for the way he forced his way onto the backs of horses in the big races, always at the expense of another jockey equally deserving of winning a classic. But that was Lester. He was who he was. It was what he did and he was forgiven because of his stature in the sport.
For all my criticism of him, by God was the sport lessened by his absence when he retired. For a good long while nothing jumped off the page when perusing the day’s runners. The sport was punctured. The king was out of his counting house and the void was chasmic, unbridgeable, it seemed. Of course, the sport had survived during his many suspensions and periods on the side-lines when injured. But this was different: he would never be coming back. Top jockeys breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt, at the announcement of the long-fellow’s retirement: no more worrying that he would nick their rides when classics and Group 1’s came around.
Yet after a spell failing as a trainer to replicate his achievements as a jockey, and that infamous and unfair 12-months imprisonment – as Lester quite rightly commented, ‘what good did it do anyone’ – he returned to crown his career with a Breeders Cup victory at the age of 54. A comeback as unlikely and breath-taking as Muhammed Ali knocking out George Foremen in the Rumble in the Jungle.
There are many books written about Lester, a few with his blessing. What is now needed is a proper biography of him written by a professional biographer, not by a racing journalist, so that his family can paint a picture of him as he was as a man, a family man, not simply as a jockey. Someone in today’s Racing Post is quoted as saying that he knew Lester for twenty years but couldn’t honestly say he knew him very well at all. Now he is gone from us, this is something that needs to be rectified.
What is my abiding memory of him? Nijinsky. Not so much his Epsom Derby win but the ridiculous ease of his King George & Queen Elisabeth romp and the beautiful ride he gave him to win the St. Leger. And the Arc disappointment, of course. I was naïve back then. Far more than now. I thought Nijinsky was unbeatable. I now know that the horse had suffered a bad bout of ringworm leading up to the Arc and his preparation was far from perfect. But I remember the astonishment at the great 3-year-old’s eclipse by a horse I had hardly heard about. It was a defeat that was hard to accept, though part and parcel of life’s learning curve. It was good to know that it was Lester’s biggest disappointment as a jockey.
Lester always believed Sir Ivor was superior to Nijinsky. He should know. But not in my eyes. Sir Ivor got beaten too many times to justify his superiority but then who am I to question Lester’s opinion. 
There will never be another like him and the world of horse racing cannot be the same without him. He was Lester.